Dream of Me
by SiriusMarauderFan
Summary: Tony meets his soulmate in his dreams.


Tony was ten when the dreams began. His dreams up until then had been fairly innocent - the good ones, anyway. Usually he was by himself, tinkering with his robots. Sometimes Jarvis or his Mom would make an appearance.

On the night of his birthday, Tony's subconcious took him to an empty playground. He thought it was strange. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been to a real playground. His father had put a stop to anything he viewed as childish when Tony was five, but Jarvis had still taken him out to play for a few months more, whenever his father was gone on one of his business trips.

Tony sat on one of the two lonely swings and pushed at the dirt beneath his sneakers, allowing himself to swing lazily as he looked over the sad example of a park. Why kind of dream was this? There wasn't even anyone to play with.

Just as he'd thought it, he saw the outline of another child coming down the slide. Tony hurried over just as the boy reached the ground. He had expected to find one of the kids he used to play with, or perhaps the son of one of his mom's friends - definitely none of his older, boring classmates. But the boy on the slide didn't seem familiar in the slightest, and judging from the state of the baggy sweatshirt and jeans he wore, Tony doubted he'd ever actually met the boy.

"I'm Tony," he said, sticking out a hand like Jarvis taught him to. The boy stuffed his hands in his pockets and stared back, seeming to Tony like a turtle hiding in its shell. Tony shrugged and lowered his hand. "That's okay. Sometimes I don't like to talk either. Let's play."

The other boy never said a word in the entire dream, not even to tell Tony his name, but they took turns on the slide and pushing each other on the swings until Tony's alarm went off. He thought back to his dream and the strange boy as he got dressed for school, only to realize that he couldn't remember what his playmate looked like, even though he was sure he'd seen his face clearly in the dream.

:-:

Tony was prepared for the second dream.

He'd asked Jarvis about strange dreams during the day and learned all about soulmates, and how he would continue to dream about his for the rest of his life, even if his memory of the dream wouldn't always be clear.

It was problematic to say the least, but Tony had decided it wasn't something he was going to let get in his way. He'd already started filling out a notebook with things he remembered from meeting his soulmate: definitely a boy, baggy clothes, possibly dark hair. This was a mystery and he was going to solve it.

The setting was different in the second dream. They were in a school hallway. It wasn't fancy like the one Tony was made to attend, but it was unmistakeable with lockers lining the walls and crumpled papers strewn on the floor.

The hallways seemed to go on forever, and Tony ran through them, peeking into empty classrooms, searching for his soulmate.

He found the boy after a few moments, huddled in a bathroom stall with a black eye and bloody nose. Tony sat down on the floor beside him, wrapping an arm around his shoulders. No one had ever dared to lay a hand on Howard Stark's son, but he heard people whispering about him all the time. No one liked a ten-year-old who was smarter than them, it seemed.

:-:

It didn't take Tony long to figure out that the dreams he was having were not necessarily the same as his soulmate's. He figured he was seeing things and places from his soulmate's life - his school, his park, sometimes his house, even the inside of his closet - but for all he knew, his soulmate could see into his houses and the jet and hotels.

They could never communicate, but by the time Tony was going off to MIT, he had a notebook full of observations from his dreams and was fairly certain his soulmate lived in America. By the time he graduated, he had narrowed it down to five states based on weather patterns, but the trail of clues soon went cold, and so did his enthusiasm.

He was an orphan, inheriting and company, trying to makes things work, and his favorite mystery had to take a backseat to it all.

It was after twenty-eight years of fragmented dreams that Tony turned on the news that he finally got the answers he'd been searching for, seeing his dream come to life as he watched footage of a giant green monster ripping Harlem apart.

He smiled behind his coffee cup, fitting the puzzle pieces together.

"JARVIS, get me everything you can find on that green man."


End file.
